Willa Cather quotes - page 2

Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding. (Willa Cather)
Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing - desire. View quote
Willa Cather
I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate. View quote
Willa Cather
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. View quote
Willa Cather
One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days, as to fortune or fame. View quote
Willa Cather
When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless. View quote
Willa Cather
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values. View quote
Willa Cather
Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it. View quote
Willa Cather
The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech - it is a gift from heart to heart. View quote
Willa Cather
I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now. View quote
Willa Cather
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself. (Willa Cather)
The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor. View quote
Willa Cather
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. View quote
Willa Cather
From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas. View quote
Willa Cather
In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded. View quote
Willa Cather
Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient. View quote
Willa Cather
The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life. View quote
Willa Cather
The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate. View quote
Willa Cather
We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while. View quote
Willa Cather
Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret? View quote
Willa Cather
It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the foundation of early races. (Willa Cather)
Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach. View quote
Willa Cather
Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past. View quote
Willa Cather
Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had. View quote
Willa Cather
There is a popular superstition that "realism" asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme? View quote
Willa Cather